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Upon this poem Professor Craik makes the following just and pertinent remarks:- This piece is, perhaps, one of the most favourable examples that could be produced in support of such a theory of poetry as Wordsworth appears to have set out with, and is supposed, in the common notion, to have adhered to in nearly all that he has written. The language is, for the most part, direct and simple, not very much distinguished, except by the rhyme, from what might be poured out, in the circumstances supposed, on the mere impulse of natural passion; and yet the lines are full of poetic power. Undoubtedly passion, or strong feeling, even in the rudest natures, has always something in it of poetry, something of the transforming and idealizing energy which gives both to conception and expression their poetical character; still it is not true, either that poetry is nothing more than vivid sensation, or that the real language of men, however much excited, is usually, to any considerable extent, poetry. Even in this poem, unadorned as it is for the greater part, there will be found to be a good deal besides metre added to the natural language of passion; and the selection, too, must be understood as a selection of person as well as of language, for assuredly the affliction of Margaret,' even though it might have been as deeply felt, would not have supplied to one man or woman in a thousand or a million anything like either the diction or the train of reflection to which it has given birth in her, or rather, in the great poet of whose imagination she, with all she feels and utters, is the creation. For this, after all, is the great fact, that there never has been and never can be poetry without a poet; upon whatever principle or system of operation he may proceed, whether by the selection and metrical arrangement of the real language of passion, or in any other way, it is the poet that makes the poetry, and without him it cannot have birth or being; he is the bee, without whom there can be no honey-the artist or true creator, from whom the thing produced, whatever be its materials, takes shape, and beauty, and a living soul."* Such are the comments of Professor Craik. By way of appendix to these, I would, for my part, advert to the exquisite felicity of expression which pervades the poem, simple and unadorned as it is. Each word, like the stones of a well-compacted edifice, in the right place-nothing that one could wish to mend or take away. This happy combination of a few simple touches will often in poetry, as in music, produce an impression which more elaborate strains fail to do. Of Wordsworth's felicity of expression, as well as his perfect mastery of the sentimental and pathetic, not to say the passionate—an element of the poetic character in which, upon the whole, he seems to have been decidedly deficient, but of the calmly sentimental and pathetic, let me give one example more in illustration, an example from the singular little poem of the affections, entitled " Louisa," whose intrinsic beauty may well plead excuse for its insertion :

* Craik's "Sketches," &c., vol. vi, p. 125.

"She dwelt among the untrodden ways,
Beside the springs of Dove;

A inaid whom there were none to praise,
And very few to love.

"A violet by a mossy stone,
Half hidden from the eye!
Fair as a star, when only one

Is shining in the sky.

"She lived unknown, and few could know

When Lucy ceased to be;

But she is in her grave; and oh

The difference to me!"

We must now proceed to touch upon Wordsworth's later and more elevated productions. Foremost in this class we would unhesitatingly place his magnificent ode or hymn, entitled, "Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood," an ode perhaps the finest in the English language, if indeed it were not Milton's celebrated "Ode on the Nativity," with which, in point of sublimity at least, it might well bear comparison, and that were no small praise. This (Wordsworth's) grand ode is a poetic exposition of a characteristic doctrine of the Platonic philosophy-the doctrine, namely, of the soul's pre-existence in some higher and nobler sphere ere coming into the body, which was looked upon as a place of exile and a prison-house; that all our knowledge of abstract truths (as of the mathematical sciences, &c.), all our conceptions of abstract goodness, greatness, beauty, &c., are but realizations, reminiscences more or less distinct, of what the soul had learned while in that its state of pre-existence. Such is the doctrine upon which Plato founds his main argument in support of the soul's immortality, in his famous dialogue, entitled, "Phædo," where, as well as in several passages in "Phædrus "and in "Timæus," the said doctrine is elaborately set forth and propounded.* Upon the belief, then, or assumption of this (the Platonic) doctrine, Wordsworth proceeds in the ode now before us, probably also having had a view to the gospel declaration touching little children, “For of such is the kingdom of heaven" Matt. xix. 13, 14; Mark x. 13; Luke xviii. 15. To illustrate the poet's meaning by a passage or two from the ode itself, the doctrine of pre-existence is distinctly enunciated in the following lofty strain :

V.

"Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:

The soul that rises with us, our life's star,

Hath had elsewhere its setting,

And cometh from afar;

* The thoughtful reader will find some excellent observations on this subjectin which, too, this ode is quoted-in Rev. William Archer Butler's "Lectures on the History of Ancient Philosophy," Vol. II., Series iii., lecture 4, pp. 241-264. This is a work of singular elegance, thoughtfulness, and value.

Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home.
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Shades of the prison-house* begin to close
Upon the growing boy;

But he beholds the light, and whence it flows;
He sees it in his joy.

The youth, who daily farther from the east
Must travel, still is Nature's priest,
And by the vision splendid

Is on his way attended.

At length the man perceives it die away,
And fade into the light of common day.

VI.

"Earth fills her lap with pleasures of her own;
Yearnings she hath in her own natural kind;
And even with something of a mother's mind,
And no unworthy aim,

The homely nurse doth all she can
To make her foster-child, her inmate, man,
Forget the glories he hath known,

And that imperial palace whence he came."

In the same grand strain the ode continues and ends. That Wordsworth actually believed in this Platonic theory it would be, perhaps, too much to assert; but it certainly seems to have had a strong fascination for him, traces of it being found not only here, but elsewhere throughout his poetry. Fanciful as the theory may be, it has nevertheless a certain vague grandeur and sublimity, very attractive to the excursive imagination.

To enter into anything like a detailed criticism of Wordsworth's numerous works would far exceed the limits of such an essay as this; but amongst his other poems of a higher order we would specially notice the beautiful "Lines on Tintern Abbey," lines full of a deep and spiritual beauty; and, though in a different style, the noble classic poem of "Laodamia," from which the following pas sage, illustrative of the ancient pagan notion of a state of future happiness, may be here transcribed:

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"He spake of love, such love as spirits feel,

In worlds whose course is equable and pure;
No fears to beat away, no strife to heal,
The past unsighed for, and the future sure;
Spake as a witness of a second birth
For all that is most perfect upon earth:

The body.

† Vide, e. g.," Excursion," Book IV.

"Of all that is most beauteous-imaged there
In happier beauty; more pellucid streams,
An ampler ether, a diviner air,

And fields invested with purpureal gleams:

Climes which the sun, who sheds the brightest day
Earth knows, is all unworthy to survey."

The classical reader will here be reminded of Virgil's fine descrip tion Eneid, VI., 640) of the Elysian fields,

66 Largior hic campos æther et lumine vestit,

Purpureo, solemque suum, sua sidera norunt," &c.,

of which the present is evidently in some sort an imitation, though I do not know but that the modern poet has even surpassed his original. Wordsworth, amongst the many productions of his prolife Muse, has left a vast number of " Sonnets," of a multifarious description, which Professor Masson well characterizes as some of "the finest and most sonorous things in our language," and as evincing more of the true lyric spirit (in which he believes Wordsworth to have been generally wanting) than any of his other poems. As a sonnet writer, Wordsworth might even bear comparison with Milton (whom it was his own favourite aspiration some day to rival); indeed, it might be a matter of question whether he should not be preferred to his great predecessor in this respect. Upon Wordsworth's "Sonnets generally, we regret that we cannot dwell, so we shall give but one of his miscellaneous sonnets-one of his most felicitous pieces, widely and deservedly admired—and then pass to his "Ecclesiastical Sonnets," which, if not so much in a poetic point of view, yet may be more immediately interesting as illustrative of the poet's religious tenets and sentiments; albeit, even regarded simply in a poetic light, they are of no mean merit. First, however, for the specimen referred to, from his miscellaneous sonnets, one of Wordsworth's earliest poetic productions, bearing the date 1803, and composed by the author while crossing Westminster Bridge on a fine September morning, in company with his favourite sister, at four o'clock :

"SONNET COMPOSED UPON WESTMINSTER BRIDGE, SEPT. 3, 1803. "Earth has not anything to show more fair: Dull would he be of soul who could pass by

A sight so touching in its majesty.

This city doth like a garment wear

The beauty of the morning; silent, bare,

Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie
Open unto the fields and to the sky,

All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.
Never did sun more beautifully steep

In his first splendour valley, rock, or hill;
Ne'er saw I, never felt a calm so deep!

The river glideth at his own sweet will.
Dear God! the very houses seem asleep,
And all that mighty heart is lying still!"

We now come to Wordsworth's "Ecclesiastical Sonnets," "wherein," says Masson, "he traces, as in a series of bold retrospective glimpses, the history of Christianity in the British islands.

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There are," the Professor continues, passages in these sonnets worth; for their historical effect, many pages of the writings of our ecclesiastical historians."

It is somewhat remarkable that Wordsworth, who, as we have seen, had in his early days been in politics a hot republican and sympathizer with the French Revolution, whose principles he deeply imbibed during a residence of a year in France, and who had also, it would appear, been no very strict religionist-for he himself tells us, in "The Prelude,"* bow, during his residence at Cambridge, he used to abhor the sound of the chapel bells, summoning the students to morning and evening prayers;-it is, I say, somewhat remarkable that, from such a beginning, he should have ended by becoming both a Tory and a high Churchman; that such, however, was the fact is abundantly evident from the poems written in after life, wherein he untiringly sings the praises of the Church and State of England,† his sentiments with regard to the first being warmly expressed, above all, in the "Ecclesiastical Sonnets at present

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under our notice. His own account of the circumstances which originally led him to the composition of these "Ecclesiastical Sonnets" may here not be uninteresting:- During the month of December, 1820, I accompanied a much beloved and honoured friend in a walk through different parts of his estate, with a view to fix upon the site of a new church which he intended to erect. It was one of the most beautiful mornings of a mild season; our feelings were in harmony with the cherishing influences of the scene; and, such being our purpose, we were naturally led to look back upon past events with wonder and gratitude, and on the future with hope. Not long afterwards, some of the sonnets, which will be found towards the close of this series, were produced as a private memorial of that morning's occupation. The Catholic question, which was agitated in Parliament about that time, kept my thoughts in the same course, and it struck me that certain points in the ecclesiastical history of our country might advantageously be presented to view in verse. Accordingly I took up the subject, and what I now offer to the reader was the result," &c.-Rydal Mount, January 24th, 1822.

Such is Wordsworth's own account of the matter. Let us now take a glimpse of the poet's peculiar religious views from a few of the sonnets themselves. I say peculiar, for the general influence of Christianity in moulding and modifying his moral and intellectual perceptions is everywhere traceable throughout his writings (vide "Excursion," &c.), which are marked by a singularly calm, pious, and contemplative tone and spirit. Life! death! eternity!-these

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* Book III.

† Vide, e. g., "Excursion," Book VI.

"Life! death! eternity! momentous themes," &c., "Excursion," Book VIII.

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